


Christmas Kisses (An A Very Long Summer story)

by calathea



Series: A Very Long Summer [9]
Category: I Want To Go Home! - Korman
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 01:46:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calathea/pseuds/calathea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three kisses at Xmas (Rudy/Mike, characters from the Epilogues)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Christmas Kisses (An A Very Long Summer story)

**Christmas Eve**

It was only the vibration of his phone in his hip pocket that alerted Mike to the fact that it was ringing, since he had his headphones on and his iPod turned up as loud as he could bear. He was aiming for plausible deniability when his mother accused him of deliberately ignoring her request to go make small talk with her Aunt Maggie, who was about three hundred years old, smelled funny and pinched his cheeks and said he was a handsome boy the last time she came to visit. Unfortunately that meant he couldn't hear anything else either.

He pulled out his earplugs hastily and tugged his phone out of his pocket, glancing briefly at the name on the caller display before diving into his walk-in closet and hissing into the phone: "Rudy?"

"None other," Rudy said. "Why are you whispering?"

Mike glanced around the room, and then pulled the door of his closet shut behind him, kicking a few shoes out of the way and sitting down in one corner. "I'm hiding out from my great-aunt," he said, still trying to keep his voice to a murmur.

"I see," Rudy said, in the tone of a man who saw nothing, or at least nothing sensible, but who was prepared to put up with a certain level of idiocy provided he got laid regularly. It was a tone that Mike had become entirely too familiar with since the summer. Sometimes he thought he'd like to wipe that undertone of _smugness_ out of Rudy's voice, but unfortunately he couldn't think of a way to do it that didn't involve _him_ not getting laid, which, no. That wasn't something Mike was prepared to give up, not even to get one over Rudy. "Is this irrational fear specific to great-aunts, or will any aged female relative provoke this response?" Rudy asked, sounding mildly curious.

Mike sighed into the phone. "This is the one who pinches me. You should see the marks she leaves," he explained, shuddering at the memory of the bruises she'd left last year. "Anyway. How are you? Having a good Christmas Eve?"

"I've had worse," Rudy said, lightly. "Traffic was a bitch though."

There was a slight creaking sound from Mike's room, and he froze, barely breathing. The noise didn't repeat, and he relaxed again. "Uh," he said, "Traffic? I thought you were already at home?"

"Hmm?" Rudy said, sounding distracted. There were more creaking noises, and Mike cowered back in his corner of the dimly-lit closet, his heart beating frantically.

"Shit," Mike squeaked into the phone, as footsteps moved across the room. "There's someone in my room."

Suddenly the door to the closet swung open, light flooding into the space from the room. Mike made a horribly embarrassing noise somewhere between a whoop and a screech, fumbled with his phone, dropping it into a pair of boots standing nearby, and banged his head on the shelf when he lurched upright to confront the intruder.

Rudy raised an eyebrow at him, and put his own phone back into his pocket. "I know you're not the master of metaphor," he said, calmly, walking into the closet and fishing Mike's phone out of the dark recesses of the boot. "But when I said I thought we should be discreet, this isn't quite what I had in mind."

"What?" said Mike, mechanically accepting his phone back from Rudy and switching it off. "I... What?"

Rudy looked around the closet meaningfully.

Mike grimaced at him. "I told you, I was hiding," he said. He peered around Rudy's shoulder. "But, since you mention discretion, what the hell are you doing here?"

"Your dad let me in. I think he was hiding out in the garage, drinking. I..." Rudy said, then uncharacteristically, broke off, turning around to glance over his shoulder and shut the door to the closet, closing them in. He turned back to Mike, who was surprised to see a slight blush across Rudy's cheekbones. Rudy took a step forward, moving in close to Mike. "I wanted to see you."

Mike blinked at him. "You drove all the way here in the dark, in the snow?" he said. "I thought you said your family did a thing on Christmas Eve."

Rudy took another step closer, and reached up to tuck a strand of hair behind Mike's ear. "I wanted to see you," he said again.

Mike sucked in a breath. "Okay," he said, after a moment. "Hi."

"Hi," said Rudy, and his lips curved upwards in a tiny smile. Mike reached for him.

The thing about Rudy, Mike thought dazedly uncounted minutes later, threading his fingers into Rudy's hair when Rudy dipped his head to kiss the hollow at Mike's collarbone, the thing about Rudy was that he never normally seemed to enjoy _anything_, even the things he was really good at. But: "I like making you moan," Rudy murmured, close to Mike's ear. His fingernails scraped gently down Mike's spine, and Mike shivered, trying to stifle a little whimpering noise. Rudy eased his knee between Mike's, and Mike tightened his fingers in Rudy's hair, pulling him back for another long, fevered kiss.

"I like you," Mike broke away to whisper, gasping for breath. He felt Rudy's lips part and kissed him again. "Even when you're smug," he added after a moment.

Rudy's arms squeezed tight around him for a moment, and then he relaxed again. "You haven't seen your face some mornings when I stay over," he said, his fingers skating along the edge of the waistband of Mike's jeans. "Like a cat with jam."

Mike choked out a laugh. "I like that too," Rudy said, and kissed Mike again. Mike didn't know whether Rudy meant the laugh or his alleged smugness, but discarded the question as irrelevant after a second, concentrating on the sweep of his fingers over Rudy's skin, on the warm pressure of Rudy's body where they touched, on the glide of Rudy's lips and tongue. He was about to discard Rudy's shirt as well when suddenly:

"Oh my God! My eyes!" The sudden glare of light from Mike's bedroom was broken by the silhouette of his sister. The door slammed shut again. "Mom!" he heard her yell, "Mike and Rudy are in the closet!"

"Now, Vicky," Mike heard his mother call back, "Just because Mike hasn't chosen to share with you about his relationship with Rudy..."

Mike let his head drop onto Rudy's shoulder.

"No, I mean, they're in Mike's _closet_, making out," Vicky yelled back, aggrieved. "If Mike can make out with his boyfriend in his closet, why do I always have to sit in the kitchen with _my_ boyfriend? That's not fair!"

"Mike is upstairs? I must just see his darling little face," interjected a third voice, and Mike stiffened with horror, pulling his hands out from under Rudy's clothes. Heavy footsteps could be heard making their way up the stairs.

"Aunt Maggie, er, they'll come down! Come have some tea!" he heard his mother say, while Vicky exclaimed: "No!" at the same time. The footsteps paused, and Mike dragged himself out of Rudy's arms, frantically trying to smooth down his clothes and his hair. Rudy leaned against the wall and watched him. _His_ hair, of course, had fallen perfectly back into place without fuss.

"Mike!" his mother called, "Come downstairs and bring Rudy with you, please!"

Mike, who recognized the polite but steely tone of his mother's voice, rolled his eyes at Rudy. "You must have really wanted to see me to risk my family on Christmas Eve," he quipped as he reached out to open the closet door. Rudy's hand on his stopped him.

"I did," Rudy said. Mike, surprised, met his eyes. Rudy looked back at him, bland as ever, but Mike felt a rush of warmth as he blushed, and his insides melted into a happy, gooey mess.

"Oh," he said, "I... You know that I..."

"Mike!" his mother yelled from downstairs again, and Rudy, unexpectedly, grinned widely at him and threw open the closet door while Mike was still recovering.

"Me too," Rudy said, and though the smile slid from his face the next second, he held on to Mike's hand for the rest of the night.

* ~ * ~ *

**Christmas Day**

By the time they got back to Mark's apartment somewhere around eight o'clock in the evening, Todd thought Mark might be suffering from shell-shock. He looked exhausted, at any rate, and fell face-down onto the bed without even taking his jacket off.

Todd sat down next to him. "I thought that went well," he said, and laughed when Mark just moaned in response. After a minute, Mark dragged himself up to a seated position, and rubbed tiredly at his eyes.

"It was okay?" he asked, tentatively, and Todd immediately nodded his head.

"It was fine," Todd said, firmly. "My family loved you, and I thought yesterday with your dad was great."

"Good," said Mark, looking relieved. He started to extract himself from his coat and hat, and glanced over at the time. "I'm going to call Jess," he said, grabbing his cordless phone.

Todd nodded, and leaned in to kiss him softly. "I'll put all the leftovers my mom sent home with us in the fridge," he said, grinning at Mark. "So you can gossip about my family undisturbed."

Mark started to protest, but his cheeks went pink, and Todd laughed and went out to the kitchen. The bags his mother had given him were, predictably, stuffed full of Tupperware boxes, each neatly labelled. He busied himself putting things away, half-listening to the murmur of Mark's voice, smiling when he heard Mark laugh.

It _had_ gone well, he thought. They'd decided to spend Christmas Eve with Mark's father and Christmas Day with Todd's family, and even though you really couldn't find a greater contrast between their families, there hadn't really been a difficult moment in the whole two days.

He started to assemble some heroically proportioned sandwiches, letting his mind wander while his hands were busy. Mark's father was an older, shyer version of his son, and their Christmas Eve at his house had been very quiet. "My mom was the outgoing one," Mark had whispered after his father showed them to their room and then disappeared on some kitchen-****related pretext. For all that, he welcomed Todd warmly, and unashamedly pulled Mark into a long hug when they arrived and left.

There were pictures everywhere of the three of them, Mark's mother smiling and cheerful, the curly dark hair she'd passed on to her son replaced in later years by colourful scarves and hats. Todd threatened to scan in the one of Mark, gap-toothed and mischievous in a cowboy outfit, but spent more time looking at a candid shot taken, Mark told him, by his aunt a few months before his mother's death. Mrs Webber was saying something with dramatic hand gestures, her thin pale face lit by happiness, while Mark laughed open-mouthed beside her. Mark and his father had talked about her often during the day, with love and unsentimental good humour, until Todd wished more fiercely than ever that he'd had a chance to meet her.

Even when Mark's aunt and uncle came over with their kids for dinner, though, the house had stayed quiet. Mark's cousins had gone to watch a movie in another room for a while, and after dinner the whole family had played viciously competitive scrabble, which Mark loyally said Todd didn't _entirely_ suck at, even after they lost by 145 points and Mark's dad laughed at them.

In retrospect, Todd decided now, slicing tomatoes, he should maybe have warned Mark about his own family. They'd arrived at the house mid-morning, and his entire immediate family had descended like locusts on his car, talking over and around one another, hugging him without interrupting the flow of their words. As it was, Mark had looked a little panicked when Todd's three sisters, even the eldest of whom was eight years younger than Todd, surrounded him and tried to drag him into the house.

"Don't frighten my boyfriend," Todd had called after them, and allowed his mother to hug him for the eleventh time. That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the day, Todd immersing himself in the chaos and insanity of his family, and periodically rescuing Mark when he started to look overwhelmed. Todd's mother had managed to sneak in a kiss when Mark presented her with a plant he'd grown himself, but Todd had interrupted both his elder sister Ellie's interrogation and his Uncle Frank's eggnog-spiked-with-whisky-fuelled reminiscences of Todd's childhood misdemeanours. Even so, by the evening Mark was starting to look a little frantic at all the mayhem, the voices raised in cheerful argument and the constant stream of visitors from the furthest branches of Todd's family tree. Todd's mother had laughed as they were leaving, telling them that she wouldn't try to make them stay and sleep on someone's floor, and Mark, blushing red, had stuttered something polite but hadn't quite managed to hide his relief.

"We like this one!" Todd's youngest sister Sarah told him in a piercing whisper as she said goodbye, to Mark's evident embarrassment. "You should keep him."

"I plan to," he'd whispered back, just as audibly, and all three girls had giggled and demanded one more hug.

Todd carried the sandwiches and a couple of beers into the bedroom. Mark had evidently been undressing while he was on the phone, and was half-in, half-out of his t-shirt when Todd walked in. "She gave you a watch?" he was saying. "Didn't she give you a watch last year?"

Todd set the sandwich down next to Mark, who absently ate a piece of tomato that had slipped out and smiled gratefully at Todd. "Well, is it a nice watch?" he asked. "Maybe you could sell it on EBay."

Todd moved behind him, and tugged at the hem of the t-shirt. Mark raised his free arm and let Todd pull it over his head. "What?" he said, "Sorry, Todd was taking my shirt off."

Todd could hear the burst of laughter from the other end of the phone, the faint tinny: "Way to go, Todd!" and wolf-whistle.

Mark went pink, and tried to bat Todd's hands away when he reached for the phone. "Hi Jess," Todd said, when he liberated it from Mark's grasp.

"Hi Todd," Jess replied, still laughing. "Did you have a good time with Mark's family?"

"Yeah, they all beat me at Scrabble," he said, grinning over at Mark, who was managing to pout and eat his sandwich at the same time.

"They beat _everyone_ at Scrabble," Jess said in a long-suffering tone of voice. "He sounds cheerful. Is he okay? Christmas is... well, you know how it is."

"Yeah," said Todd, "We had fun with my family. I think two of my sisters groped him, and probably my Aunt Jeannine as well."

Jess laughed, and Mark made horror-stricken faces at him. "Well, that will have taken his mind off everything," she said.

They exchanged a few more words, and then Todd hung up with a promise they would all get together on the twenty-seventh for coffee and so she could drag Mark out shopping.

Mark, sandwich finished, flopped out on his back and gazed at the ceiling while Todd ate. "She makes me buy clothes," he said, sounding woeful, "Lots of clothes. And carry stuff for her."

He sighed, and Todd grinned and finished his meal before throwing off his clothes and crawling onto the bed. Mark was more than half asleep by the time Todd had curled around him.

"Tired?" Todd said, kissing under Mark's ear as he spooned up behind him.

"Mmm," Mark replied, tugging Todd's arm around his waist. "Your family is nice, but exhausting."

Todd smiled into Mark's curls and then pressed a kiss against the nape of Mark's neck. "I know, they're crazy," he said, affectionately. "They loved you though."

"My dad likes you," Mark confided back. "He told me before we left."

"Good," Todd murmured, and wrapped his arm a little tighter around Mark's waist. "He won't mind if I hang around you for a really long time then."

Mark was almost boneless in his arms, right on the cusp of sleep. "I won't mind either," he said, so softly Todd had to strain to hear, and then yawned. "I'm going to keep you, if you.. if you..."

"Mark?" Todd said, softly, when Mark didn't finish the sentence, but Mark just sighed in his sleep. Todd closed his eyes, and let sleep take him too.

* ~ * ~ *

**Boxing Day**

Xav startled awake when someone whiskery licked his elbow and panted heavily at him. "Gnnargh!" he exclaimed, jerking his arm back under the covers. He pried his eyes open. Lucy, Daniel's golden retriever, gazed back at him placidly from beside the bed and lolled her tongue out at him.

"I hate your dog," Xav said, loudly, into his pillow, after groping in vain into the empty space on the other side of the bed.

"Yeah?" There were soft footsteps and then the bed dipped as Daniel came out of the bathroom and sat down. Xav turned to look at him blearily. Daniel seemed obnoxiously awake, and when he bent his head to brush his lips against Xav's cheek, he smelled clean and minty.

"Yeah," Xav said, and pulled the comforter over his head.

"I've noticed she's my dog and you hate her when she licks you awake, and your dog whenever she does something cute," Daniel observed mildly, pushing down a fold in the covers so he could see Xav's face.

Xav sighed and batted at Daniel's hand. "What time is it?" he asked, plaintively. "It can't possibly be morning yet."

"Early," Daniel said, stretching out beside Xav and pulling at the comforter until it covered both of them. "Not even eight yet."

Xav sighed and rolled over until his face was pushed into Daniel's neck. Daniel wrapped his arms around him and wriggled a little until they were both comfortable.

"I should call my brothers about what we're doing today," Xav said, after a long, drowsy silence had stretched out. Daniel murmured something inaudible and pressed his lips to Xav's temple. "And Rudy," Xav continued.

"If you think they'll appreciate it," Daniel said, dryly. Xav looked at him enquiringly. "I've never noticed Rudy being thrilled to be called to the phone on mornings when he has an excuse to stay in bed with Mike."

"Oh," said Xav, and then, in quite another tone: "_Oh_. Geez. Did you have to say that?"

Daniel laughed. "I like to torment you," he said, and Xav made a face at him.

"You just like to think about my adoptive parents having sex," he accused, and Daniel just laughed again.

"Oh, they're hot, you know they are," Daniel said, and Xav squirmed away from him in mock-disgust. Daniel pulled him back and settled his arms around Xav again. The dog stood up and shook herself, her collar jingling, and then lay back down in her basket with a heavy sigh. Xav felt his own eyes start to close again as he relaxed into the pleasant, familiar heat.

"Andy's picking me up at ten," Xav said finally, his voice muffled against Daniel's bare shoulder. "To go to the... To see our parents."

Daniel shifted, tangling his fingers in Xav's for comfort. "Did you get some flowers?"

Xav nodded. "David did," he said. "He said he got pink this year. That was my mom's favourite colour."

He turned his head to touch his lips to Daniel's throat. "Wear a hat this year, okay?" Daniel said, and the words buzzed meaninglessly against Xav's lips. "You shivered for hours afterward last year."

Xav nodded, not really listening. "Would you," he started, and then stopped.

Daniel made an enquiring noise. "Would I?" he asked, but Xav just shook his head, suddenly not certain he could finish the question. "You know the answer is yes, right? No matter what it is."

He paused. "Well, unless it's something bad like, I don't know. You want us to start an Abba tribute band."

Xav laughed, and felt his shoulders loosen up again. "What? I don't even like Abba!"

"Don't try to deny it," Daniel said, solemnly, "I've seen you grooving to Super Trooper when you think no one is watchi-- eep, ow, no tickling, no, no, no pinching!"

The bed was rumpled and the comforter on the verge of slithering onto the floor by the time they stopped wrestling and Xav had Daniel pinned on his back, holding him down gently by the wrists. "Say uncle," he said, as Daniel grinned up at him unrepentantly. "Or I'll... I'll kiss you with morning breath."

Daniel opened his wide with simulated horror. "God, no, anything but that," he groaned, and Xav laughed down at him, and then stilled.

"Will you come? To the cemetery?" he blurted out.

Daniel quieted just as suddenly. "Today?" he asked, carefully.

Xav nodded, and sank down to the sheets alongside Daniel. "Yeah, with me. With us," he said. "I asked. We'd like you to, if you want."

"You don't normally have other people there," Daniel said, rolling up onto his elbow to look seriously at Xav.

Xav shrugged. "Rudy and Mike came, every year before Andy could drive. It was their idea."

Daniel reached out to touch his face, stroking a thumb along the ridge of his cheekbone. "Do you want me there?" he asked, quietly.

Xav turned into him, nuzzling into Daniel's shoulder again. "It's for family," he said, closing his eyes. "You're family now."

He felt Daniel hesitate, felt the tension as it thrummed through them both. "Please," he said, at last, and Daniel nodded his head.

"Yes," he said. "We need to leave at ten?"

"Ten," Xav said. He opened his eyes again, and found Daniel looking at him with enough intensity, with enough certainty, to make his breath catch.

"If you brush your teeth, I'll take that kiss," was all Daniel said, though.

And Xav laughed, and rolled away, tripping over the abandoned comforter and Lucy, who wanted a walk, in his haste to get to the bathroom.

Fin


End file.
